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LaPlante’s Chapter 8 delves into the intricacies of dialogue. She talks about how dialogue is never just characters talking to one another. If anything, the addition of dialogue brings in new possibilities for the characters and the way they are portrayed. She also mentions how having good dialogue is the key to creating a good story. I agree there because there are some stories I’ve read in which the description of everything and actions are wonderful but the bland and pointless conversations counteract that which only make me want to stop reading and just forget the information I just received. Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” made for a great short story with this chapter. It helped me see some of the techniques LaPlante employed in action as well as be able to connect how well they worked altogether. Although, the dialogue with the bartender felt like it was kind of dragged on, it was a small enough amount that I was able to focus on Jig’s and her companion’s conversation and actions. I really enjoyed the actions Jig gave in response to certain of her companion’s sentences. It really showed off how uncaring she was in that moment and her longing to just be free without worries as she looked away and at the white hills. All in all, these were very interesting readings and I thoroughly enjoyed them.
ReplyDelete-Angélica De La Cruz
Dialogue is one of my strengths. I said this often before, and still do sometimes. After reading this chapter, I realized that, while still true, I have a long way to go before I can truly consider myself a master of dialogue. For example, while I did know that using expository dialogue in fiction is a huge pitfall (not so much if used correctly in playwriting), I didn’t know it was worse to use dialogue for a character’s “philosophical brooding”. I felt it necessary to include this “philosophical brooding” so I could get deeper into my character’s thought process, and help my readers understand him better. However, I didn’t consider the copious amount of different manners to present my character, to flesh him out and make him believable without this unnecessary dialogue.
ReplyDeleteFor quite a while, I was afflicted with the “-ly” syndrome. Whenever I wanted to portray a character’s emotions, I would put adverbs like “angrily” or “sadly” after a line of dialogue. I didn’t think about using gestures like slamming one’s fists onto a table to represent anger or looking down at the floor and hunching one’s shoulders to represent sadness or shame. Characters are supposed to be real; they’re supposed to move while conversing, interacting with the world around them. I never thought of that.
Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is a prime example of effective dialogue. The tension between the man and the girl (I gotta wonder about that particular distinction…) is palpable throughout. There’s no need for Hemingway to explicitly state it. Just reading through their dialogue is enough to illustrate it. I felt resignation with a tinge of rebellion, manipulation with a tinge of encouragement, dismissal, and apprehension. All that with just the words the characters were speaking to each other. What Hemingway did in this piece with his dialogue is what I aspire to do with my own.
This chapter and reading are definitely a must-keep future reference for me in my lifelong quest for my ultimate goal as a writer: to make my language sing.
Pedro Cano
I have always had trouble making good dialogue in my stories so reading chapter 8 of LaPlante’s book helped me see what I can do to improve the dialogue in the story that I am currently working on. I get caught up with what is going on around them that I do not pay enough attention to the dialogue. The way she talks about how giving the characters good dialogue will improve the way the characters are made in the story and it can open up new ways to go about the story and characters. It could help the readers understand my characters better instead of them having to go on and have pointless conversions that are not needed in the story.
ReplyDeleteThe short story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Hemingway was an interesting reading. The dialogue kept me into the reading. It was clear to see, without the author having to explain, how the characters felt through out the story.
Reading the chapter and “Hills Like White Elephants” helped me see how much of an importance and how dialogue should be presented in the stories. I plan to use these tips to better my stories and my characters.
-Leslie Perez
Chapter 8 focuses on how to craft great dialogue in a “realistic approximation of the way real people talk” (257) Though, I don’t agree with LaPlante’s idea that dialogue “should not be used for extended ‘philosophical brooding’ by a character” when most of Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, and others, do exactly that. The rest of chapter 8’s notions about “what dialogue is not” is helpful and a very useful method to write great dialogue. LaPlante’s method of “using placeholders” (266) was the most insightful.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants I imagined him using a method similar to LaPlante’s placeholder method. In Hemingway’s story there is much that is left unanswered and that is precisely the way Hemingway intended it, but what did the original idea look like? In a previous chapter we read that Hemingway would often only tell the reader about 10 percent of what he know about his characters. In Hills Like White Elephants it seems like we finish the story only knowing about 10 percent of what Hemingway knew about his characters. The placeholder method is something that, at least for me as a young writer, is very useful for creating stories, like Hemingway’s, that keep the reader engaged and leave them wondering.
-James C. Attwood
It is not only important to begin a story in the most aesthetically pleasing place or the characters we create and bring to life, but what type of personalities these characters possess and the relationships they have with other characters through language and dialogue. Chapter eight helps developing writers establish good communication between characters. I felt a light come on in my mind when I read the section where LaPlante mentions on page 257, what dialogue is used for, “4. Show relationships between characters who are engaged in conversation”. I feel that this sentence is key when thinking about what we want our creations to say to one another and how it’s only strengthening the connection between them and the audience. I feel the story “Hills Like White Elephants” correlates well with the chapters lesson on improving dialogue. I feel the back and forth formatting of the conversation between characters tells a lot about the faults and intimacies about the characters relationship. It tells of one that has a history and a tendency to clash but deep down there is a precious moment between the man and a woman and that is what is keeping them going round and back and forth.
ReplyDelete-Clarissa Cardenas
Chapter Eight was a great section for me, because the dialogue of my story is always the part that I dread the most. I lose myself in the setting and “point” of the narrative so much that I fall short on the story told through dialogue. LaPlante broke down what is actually a very complex part of crafting your story, from telling us immediately what dialogue is not intended for to giving example of what well-crafted dialogue could do for specific situations. “Dialogue is not necessarily grammatically correct” and “On Subtext” are probably the two sections that I took the most away from, along with some useful practices from “Using Placeholders”. My first drafts have mostly been full to the brim with overly precise dialogue - my characters became robotic and there was no interaction between the characters at a deeper level. Anything you needed to know I was too eager to state explicitly through dialogue, which as LaPlante points out isn’t the purpose of dialogue. So, I think using placeholders as she suggests and then going back, converting what I explicitly said before into a more natural language will be really helpful.
ReplyDeleteHills Like White Elephants was a good example of what LaPLante is hoping we’ll take away from this chapter. The conversation doesn’t clue us in as to what exactly is going on - there’s an operation, they’ve been in several hotels, and the girl wants things to be as they were before - but we get a sense of how each character feels about the situation. The man is somewhat distant and you can tell that his mind is mostly elsewhere during their entire conversation. While she is scared, hesitant even, and is concerned that things have just changed so drastically - his love for her included. Eyes being drawn elsewhere, looking at the ground during a conversation, the man’s simple and direct responses, and the girl’s eagerness to end the conversation as we see later, these are all examples of how these things are presented to us without being told.
-Joaquin Castillo
Chapter 8 in Method and Madness on “Crafting Effective Dialogue” was very helpful to me, especially the sections on how to use gestures and silence as part of dialogue. I need to figure out when to use direct narrative instead of dialogue to avoid having “empty scenes” (259). The section on attribution also helped me to realize that “using adverbs to describe how something was said is unnecessary” (260).
ReplyDeleteHemingway is the master of subtext, and the dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants” is an excellent example of that. In the story, the man is trying to convince the “girl” to have an operation. From the subtext of the dialogue the reader understands he wants her to have an abortion. By the woman’s gestures and nonverbal silences, we see that she doesn’t want to do it, but that she must if they are to be happy again and continue their carefree lifestyle of travel and drinking. In Hemingway class, we learned that Hemingway always wrote his dialogue while standing up because he considered it a physical sparring act similar to boxing. You get this sense of the couple’s sparring in the dialogue where she says the hills look like white elephants (269) and that “everything tastes of licorice” (270). As they discuss the operation, both characters use manipulative language to make each other feel guilty. Then, to convey the woman’s emotional frustration and pressure, the dialogue is deliberately non-grammatical when she says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” (272). Her desperation is palpable in that one sentence.
-Dorie Garza
One thing that I took away from this week’s readings was in LaPlantes chapter “He Said, She Said” page 257. She says, “Without understanding how to render on the page a realistic approximation of the way real people talks to (and at) each other, you will fail to develop one of the key tools you have for generating truly compelling creative work”. I couldn’t agree more that we have to make the dialogue in the story seem realistic and not over dramatic, plain or all over the place. A good fiction story should have a flowing and realistic dialogue between our characters. I also like how she describes what dialogue is and is not, how it can and can’t be used and when to use it. I feel like it was a crash course of dialogue that may seem sort of repetitive but the good kind of repetitive that keeps us honest and on our toes when we write. We have to keep in mind the way our characters interact with each other and what kind of relationship they have through their dialogue. The other big thing that I took away was on pages 265 through 266 on the section of Dialect. I found that this section was very informative because I personally did not know how to add special features to the characters such as accents and lisps. I think that Hemingway’s’ Hills Like White Elephants is a good example of what good dialogue looks like. The dialogue between the characters at first was a little fast to me but as the story progressed the dialogue flowed. I could see the characters relationship through the lenses of their dialogue. I could tell that there is subtext within the conversation and I wanted to read more and know more of what is going to happen next.
ReplyDelete-Marco Garza
Out of all my fears of writing dialogue is my biggest, my reasons for this are because I feel like dialogue holds so much behind, whether it be character intention, emotion, and background, it has all of this and it can be used in a way that allows all of that to be explored in a natural way, through dialogue we can become attached to characters and connect with them, this is why I feel a lack of or poorly written dialogue can make or break a story.
ReplyDeleteThis is why it’s such a stressful part for me when writing, without my characters become bland blobs in a story then my audience has no reason to keep on reading or at the most no reason to care for the characters.
I like how LaPlante shows that dialogue does not have to be just people talking, she talks about how body language, and the movements that follow the characters. This use of gesture gives a sense of depth, but this allows for things to be interpreted in a whole new way like what LaPlante says it can shed some insight into what emotion these characters are speaking with.
~Eduardo Castellanos
Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ showcased a lot of dialogue which directly ties into Alice LaPlante’s eighth chapter discussing about dialogue. For ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, it was a relatively short reading compared the others, and most of the story had dialogue instead of imagery or narration or even much action. Small actions include the third character which is just the bartender or waitress lady asking what they want while the two main characters are waiting at a train station talking and occasionally drinking while looking around or getting up. Overall, this story relies on the dialogue to tell the emotions and the conflict being expressed by the guy and girl’s relationship with one another. In a way, I could see this story being put in a play format and also reminds me of the play Ferris Wheel. With chapter eight, I was able to gain new insights about what dialogue should and should not be as well as tips of when to use or not use dialogue. Silence and body gestures are a part of a character’s dialogue as well with LaPlante providing a few tips to help guide when to use or not use them. Overall, dialogue affects a reader’s perception of a character as part of a character which has the ability to affect what a reader feels about a character leaving it as an important aspect along with actions.
ReplyDeleteSylvia Lopez
Dialogue. A critical element of many stories, the depth of dialogue reaches beyond the words that characters find themselves using. There are the dialects they have, their vocabulary, the cadences they hit with their voice, the way they move and act when they speak, and even the way they just remain silent. LaPlante writes about the subtleties of dialogue in a story in Chapter 8 and how without well crafted, logical dialogue, our character’s voices are a hindrance to how well a story can hold a reader. In “Hills Like White Elephants” Hemingway exemplifies much of what LaPlante writes about. Jig and her American companion are rarely marked as the specific speakers of many lines, we find Jig remaining silent in response to her companion’s remarks, and their movements offer a physical insight into their emotions. For example, when Jig remarks on the appearance of the hills in the distance, the American shrugs her off and drinks his beer, his mind set on other problems, namely the unknown operation he wishes for Jig to undergo. Throughout Hemingway’s story, we can also analyze a great deal of subtext, one of the key elements of good dialogue according to LaPlante, as Jig and the unnamed American discuss Jig’s reluctance to undergo an operation that she is as uncertain of as we are.
ReplyDelete-Aaron Garza
LaPlante’s Chapter on dialogue is very informative and detailed as to what good and bad dialogue is. She gives a lot of useful examples for different situation, what works and what doesn’t. I really liked the part “What Dialogue Is Not” because she breaks down what Robie MacAuley and Gorge Lanning say. However, the one about philosophical brooding is one I don’t quite understand why it is “bad.” I understand it not working, if the character talks to himself, but if it is something the characters is stating to another, then why is it bad? One that caught my attention was the one that it is not a source of facts for the piece, and the one following it about describing people places or objects in detail. I felt like the example there was a little exaggerated. However, the best I could see being overly detailed that follows this would be in the Pokémon anime, where they state the facts, details effects of attacks of throughout multiple episodes. Probably not the same thing, but that is the way I see this. I also liked the information on dialect, specifically the example on page 266 on Peter Matthiessen’s excerpt. I read that whole part with the voice of Hermes from Futurama. The story “Hills Like White Elephants” was good, but on page 271, half way through the page down I got lost as to who was saying what. I read it a couple of times and I was able to get it eventually. I was able to understand it even more after I notice the word “abortion” on Dorie Garza’s post. I read it and it all made so much sense. I knew Jig was uncertain about doing something, but I never though of it being an abortion. These is so much hidden in the subtext, and it is amazing.
ReplyDelete-Alexis Perez
Dialogue is one of the trickiest parts of a story to write. Not only do I often feel this way, but when asking other writers, we can all agree writing it is difficult. Alice LaPlante distinguishes the difference between dialogue and effective dialogue in chapter eight. Dialogue is not separate from the characters or the story but a continuation of it. LaPlante even suggests that seeing it as a “physical exchange between characters” would help us writers use our dialogue to have an effect on our characters. Our words are our only tools. The key is making it sound natural. Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is a great example of the uses of dialogue LaPlante covered in the chapter. The conversation between the man and Jig uses gestures within the dialogue tags to show the continuation of the scene. Not stopping the scene is super important. When I first read the story, I was immediately drawn to the subtext in the dialogue between characters. While it is never explicitly stated in the story, there is enough information to read between the lines to learn just what situation the main characters have found themselves in. This story relies strongly on dialogue, and the way Hemingway chooses to tell the story never leaves readers clueless over what takes place.
ReplyDelete-Gabriela Urbano
Chapter 8 focused on the importance of dialogue and how to give your characters a voice. LaPlante explained that dialogue carries the substance that generates creative compelling work and is a critical aspect of fiction writing. There have been times where my dialogue been lackluster in bringing out the voices of my characters. I knew that gestures and mannerisms were an important part of showing what type of person they were and how they show it through their actions. Though, LaPlante explained that having too much dialogue would take away from the story, away from the dialogue, that the writer is trying to write. The same thing goes for things that are unnecessary or being repetitive like using adverbs to describe things when you can easily use dialogue to show that behavior. I thought this chapter was a good reminder of the basic foundation of voice and of dialogue for characters and how to use that to show the audience the entire world and the relationships between characters.
ReplyDeleteAs for “Hills Like White Elephants,” I thought it was an amazing little story that emphasized Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory by using dialogue as a means to tell the audience the themes and the events little context. This minimalistic style highlights the characters in Hemingway’s short story and gives their mannerisms and their gestures importance alongside the way they communicate with each other. From just simple words, the audience receives insight into their relationship and how they react to certain things around them like the alcohol, the hills, the environment.
- Joseph Gonzalez
Chapter 8 of LaPlante's reading gives us a huge variety of examples of "good and bad" dialogue. We are given all these different explanations and opinions on what dialogue should look like when it comes to different types of scenarios. We are shown how it is better to use short and descriptive type of dialogue rather than a longer detailed one. LaPlante gives the example of drama because she explains how in like a play emotions are portrayed in a short amount of dialogue along with the expressions of the characters. She also mentions how minimizing stuff that was not needed then we could have a better expression of emotions in general. The more dialogue there was the more confused or the longer it would take for the readers to get the point of what was trying to be expressed through that writing. LaPlante clearly states that this issue would lead to having the dialogue take away meaning from the story rather than express it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the story "Hills Like White Elephants," I found it to be a great example of what LaPlante was trying to explain. Most of the story was pure dialogue and we still got a lot our of it. I felt as if it still did an amazing job in portraying all the imagery for the setting of the story itself and the characterization of it as well. Even though we are not told a lot, we are still shown a lot with the minimal dialogue that goes on between the girl and the man. Just by the gestures that they make we are told so much within that and I just feel as if the story revolves around that in some way as well.
-Yelitza Saenz
I’ve always heard that if you want to get good dialogue, use the real world. The advice usually goes with going to a public space and listening to random people that walk by you, or are sitting just a few feet away. Trying to get dialogue right is very crucial for me, since I’m trying to become a filmmaker. I purposely make my writing dialogue heavy; as a means to practice getting good dialogue on the page. I’ve already heard much of LaPlante’s advice on writing dialogue, but having it broken down into different parts works well as a refresher. That being said, I was surprised much of the “what not to do” when it comes to dialogue, is often used in film. It boils down to exposition. Many bad, and on accession good, films suffer from trying to use exposition to explain to the audience what is the context of the story, even though they can use visuals that writing cannot. I was very surprised in seeing philosophical brooding as something that dialogue shouldn’t be used. There are so many works that use philosophical debate, or even philosophical ruminations, as a central aspect of the story, Examples include: The Matrix, Walden, Catcher in the Rye, even Shakespeare and Greek tragedies used dialogue to express the ideas they wan to convey. I was surprised the other reading was “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway no less. It’s a real coincidence that my own story was dialogue heavy like this one. I found it interesting, even though it was hard to understand what operation they were talking about.
ReplyDelete-Jose Sias
According to LaPlante Dialogue is all about the way real people talk or rather how natural things sound. Yet, there are ways to wreck your dialogue in your writing such as being grammatical correct, describing the scenery through dialogue, and philosophical brooding. I like how she states that when your character philosophical broods you run the risk of the lost of interest from reader. Most likely because you are giving everything away and characters are extensions of ourselves, they aren’t perfect, they want to conceal things; not show who they really are. As for the use of grammar in dialogue you need to know that it’s relative to the way people talk and the dialect they use. For example LaPlante states “…People seldom speak in full sentences.” When using dialects in dialogue this chapter frowns upon it mostly because of how it hinders the speech of your character. I mean if you use too much I can see that happening such as “…Writing in dialect…can be more distracting than illuminating…” stated on page 256. Describing scenery takes away from the dialogue because it’s so descriptive that your characters aren’t actually saying anything. Basically there is balance and you need to know how and when to use dialogue.
ReplyDelete-Allison Gonzalez
A lot of what we read in chapter 8 is what we see in everything written by Hemingway. Ernest was infatuated with Europe, but extremely in love with Spain specifically, and "Hills Like White Elephants" takes place in a train in Spain. Whats significant about Hemingway's stories (novels, shorts sto.) is visualizing whats not there. By this I mean, even though the dilemma is not specific, we gain an understanding of what has occurred to both the characters in the story and assume what there going through by reading and analyzing the dialogue, their use of language serve as hints to us. The author is known for providing us sufficient amount of both worlds, meaning just enough dialogue to keep us curious, just enough description to imagine/mentally see where they are and their surroundings. Even though the dialogue is extremely detailed and given in this piece, its enough to keep us wanting an answer to our questions as readers.
ReplyDeleteOn page 256 we read about how to much description of the story's setting can be discouraging to the dialogue, Ernest's knows exactly how to convey a meaningful conversation with being to descriptive of whats actually happening, leaving it up to us readers to figure it out the clues. Very fascinating!
- Andrea Castaneda
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